Little Miss Sunshine

(Fox Home Entertainment, 12.19.2006)

Did the publicity team pushing Little Miss Sunshine towards a Best Picture Oscar even see the film they were promoting? If they did see it, they didn't get it. The film's entire premise is built around an optimistic and oddball girl named Olive (played by Abigail Breslin) convincing her emotionally and financially bankrupt family to drive cross county, solely in the belief that she can win a children's beauty pageant in California.

Upon arrival, Olive's family discovers that her nerdy charms will forever be lost if she fits into the freakishly absurd realities of child beauty pageantry and so they do everything they can to fight the creepy, clown-faced American Dream awaiting at the end of their journey. Olive's family's natural weirdness is contrasted with pageantry weirdness bred from hyper-conformity, but thankfully -- and hysterically -- natural weirdness saves the day in the end.

Meanwhile, Hollywood at large became all about turning Little Miss Sunshine into the antithesis of its own content this awards season, luring the film's makers deeper and deeper into the glitz of Tinseltown on the road to the Oscars. Little Miss Sunshine winning a Best Picture Academy Award would have been the equivalent of Olive giving in and swallowing the beauty pageant Kool Aid being served up in plastic (surgery) cups by pageant judges and MCs in the film and yet, somehow, it's hard to believe that the Academy ever grasped this irony.

Think of Little Miss Sunshine as a 1970s-influenced variation of a The Wizard of Oz revival with Olive as a modern Dorothy, who has to learn that there's no place like home via a transforming road trip with her family, Steve Carrell's character as the lion/scholar who needs to find his courage, Greg Kinnear's character as the scarecrow/father who needs a brain, Paul Dano's teenage mute as a young man filled with a lifetime of bottled rage (but no voice for his anger), and Alan Arkin as the crusty, wife-beater-wearing, heroin addict grandpa. Okay, those last two sound more like Blizzard of Ozz than The Wizard of Oz, but you get the idea.

Among Little Miss Sunshine's many virtues is the filmmakers' ability to effortlessly bottle the idiosyncratic charm of Breslin as Olive and distribute it evenly across the film's woods-and-yellows art direction, its retro Volkswagon Bus and crappy hotel room settings, and a script that believes being one's own nerdy self is better than smiling and fake laughing one's way into deathly approval.

The American Dream is a shape-shifter, taking the form of William Hung one year and a bald, Neo-Nazi-resembling Britney Spears the next, but the basic theme throughout American history -- a theme which Little Miss Sunshine captures so well -- is that dreaming big on U.S. soil will leave you lured, spent, and spit out, in that order. It's not often that a child performance sets the tone for a moody adult ensemble piece dealing with ugly themes in a black comedy fashion, especially when that child is the least troubled, most vulnerable part of the story and yet it works perfectly in Little Miss Sunshine.

The extras on this disc delve into directors Jonathon Dayton and Valerie Faris' filmmaking process. Dayton and Faris provide an audio commentary track for the film, as well as additional commentary tracks for each of four alternate endings, which were discarded for a variety of reasons. These tracks emphasize the difficulty of creating and maintaining an appropriate tone throughout the film and how difficult it was not to lose this tone in the final minutes of the story. The film's trailer, as well as a music video of the DeVotchka song "Till the End of Time," rounds out the features on this excellent disc. -- Jason Woloski